The World’s First Blockchain Verified Carbon Credit is Live
TLDR:
Open Forest Protocol is an On-Chain Carbon, RWA (Real World Asset), and Institutional Crypto play launching blockchain-native carbon credits through its novel verification and asset issuance platform — A Consensus Layer for the On-Chain Carbon Market. After building for two years, its first credit was launched via the Carbon Development Project Celsia, based in Colombia. This credit launch is the first of many planned for 2024, with a pipeline of over 70 projects and more than 6,000 Hectares On-Chain.
Bringing verifiable carbon credits on-chain
Open Forest Protocol is a three-year-old project built on NEAR Protocol with a mission of upgrading the transparency and quality of the existing voluntary carbon market (VCM). While many blockchain-based solutions have attempted to ‘bridge’ carbon credits from legacy verifiers in the past, Open Forest is charting a new approach to the future of carbon: natively verifying and issuing carbon credits, directly from the blockchain.
On January 23rd, this vision was realized, when Open Forest’s first carbon credit was issued by Celsia, a carbon development project based in Colombia. This achievement marks a paradigm shift for both the Voluntary Carbon Market and the value proposition of blockchain-based systems.
For the first time, a fully ‘data-backed’ carbon credit has been issued, to the extent that an off-taker or third-party trader can easily verify on-chain the following details about their carbon credit:
- Where it came from.
- When the project started.
- What data was collected to create the carbon credit.
- When the data was uploaded.
- Who verified the data.
- How many counterparties verified the data.
- What methodology was used to create and issue the credit.
- Where the credit was issued.
- When the credit was offset.
With Open Forest, every carbon credit is entirely visible from the inception of the carbon development project (documented on a novel product known as Atlas), to the upload, verification, issuance, and offset of the credit in question. All credits created are automatically distributed to the project’s wallet after verification and issuance with a portion of the credit going to a buffer pool, as well as to protocol token holders ($OPN). The credits themselves are documented as multi-tokens under the NEP-245 standard, allowing anyone to view the quantity and Project ID of the credit in question.
Jumpstarting the On-Chain Carbon Market:
With institutional interest in crypto reaching all time highs, Open Forest is a unique protocol built on NEAR that holds the promise of bringing On-Chain carbon to the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) at scale. This means that both institutions, carbon traders, and crypto-protocols, can easily access some of the highest quality carbon credits in the world, with confidence towards its integrity and longevity.
While Open Forest Protocol currently has over 80 projects on the network representative of more than 5,000 Hectares, its upcoming pipeline is indicative of a much larger role in the future VCM:
- More than 65 projects are planned to onboard in 2024, representing over 50,000 Hectares.
- An ongoing agreement with Ivory Coast for a 3,500 HA agroforestry project.
- One of 10 companies selected by the World Economic Forum Uplink Trillion Tree’s Challenge (link).
- Planning a Token Sale in Q3 — Q4 of 2024 to jumpstart long-term growth and development.
At a time when the Voluntary Carbon Market is facing a crossroads, Open Forest’s launch of the world’s first blockchain-based carbon credit is a significant milestone for improving the overall quality and standards of this nascent asset class. As many consultants and corporations have attested, the VCM currently doing $2.5 billion per year in volume is expected to get much, much larger in the future:
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